Hamad Butt

Hamad Masood Butt (9 January 1962 – 25 September 1994) was a British artist of Pakistani heritage who made a series of pioneering works in the early 1990s which sought to bring art into conversation with science, specifically in critical response to the AIDS crisis.

Early life and education Butt was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1962 and moved with his family to East London in 1964. He was the second of five siblings. He was raised in the Muslim faith. As a child he lived in Manor Park and Ilford.

He undertook a series of courses in art from 1981 until 1987, including a foundation year at Goldsmiths, University of London and short courses in printmaking and other media at Morley College and Central Saint Martins. He enrolled on the BA Fine Art degree programme at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1987 to 1990.

Career Butt graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 1990. Substance Sublimation Units is a kinetic sculpture that uses a heating element to sublimate the crystals into a violet gas inside a series of glass chambers organised into the shape of a ladder.

Familiars was first shown in 1992 at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.

Throughout his work of the 1990s, Butt devised encounters between art and science.

Butt also made many paintings, drawings and works on paper.

Familiars was posthumously included in the exhibition Rites of Passage: Art at the End of the Century (curated by Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris) at Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in 1995 alongside works by Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Bill Viola and others. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and again at Tate Britain, the latter as part of its exhibition of the Tate permanent collection in 2023–24.

Death Butt died of AIDS-related pneumonia in St Mary's Hospital, London.